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What is the name of this short story?

A society is seeking admission to a "federation". At a state dinner it is discovered that the food is actually babies that the society recycles after the babies fail to meet certain standards. The visiting delegation is horrified.

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  • Do you know when you read this? Was it new at the time? Did you read it in a book or online? If a book do you know what the cover looked like or what any other stories in it were about? If online do you roughly know what site? Can you edit in this information?
    – TheLethalCarrot ♦
    Commented Sep 7, 2018 at 9:46
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    There's a similar sub-plot of the BBC Radio 4 comedy "Welcome to our Village, Please Invade Carefully". In which alien invaders have a tradition of eating babies of the races they've conquered, but they don't enjoy it.
    – AJFaraday
    Commented Sep 7, 2018 at 15:37

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Miriam Allen deFord: "The Season of the Babies" (1959). This is a great short story that challenges our preconceptions of right and wrong.

The diplomats visiting a lost colony discover at a banquet that they are eating babies; those that didn't make the cut in an annual test of health, intelligence, etc. The hosts, in turn, are aghast that Earth people practice birth control, since this allows sub-par children to flourish at the expense of better children who might otherwise have been born.

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    I found a source that backs this up but it only really repeats what you say here, nice job. And congrats on 5k!
    – TheLethalCarrot ♦
    Commented Sep 7, 2018 at 12:59

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